[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.

I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.

To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see? No. But yeah. The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.